1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printing apparatus such as a printer or a digital multifunction peripheral, a control method thereof, and a storage medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
A printing system such as a POD (Print on Demand) system that performs highly productive and highly efficient print processing includes a large-format printing apparatus, and various types of sheet feeding apparatuses and sheet processing apparatuses are connected to the system. Such sheet feeding apparatuses and sheet processing apparatuses may require some time to perform a preparation operation that can lead to a reduction of productivity, and thus a technique is used to increase the productivity as much as possible. For example, a technique is proposed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2006-035751, in which when a print job is received, interpretation is performed on the print job, and then it is determined which sheet processing apparatus and which sheet feeding apparatus are used to execute processing and at which timing the processing is executed. Then, before execution of the processing actually starts, control is performed so as to perform in advance a preparation operation for the sheet processing apparatus or the sheet feeding apparatus determined to be used. Another technique is also proposed in, for example, Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2008-222399 in which as a preparation operation of a sheet feeding apparatus, air is blown to sheets loaded in the sheet feeding apparatus so as to convey the sheets sequentially from the topmost sheet separated from the sheets. In such a conventional printing system, if an interruption instruction to interrupt a job is received during execution of the job, the preparation operation of the sheet feeding apparatus (sheet feeding cassette) or the like is stopped.
Meanwhile, in recent years, a printing system is proposed that receives a specific interruption instruction issued to make a change in the settings. Such a printing system interrupts (temporarily stops) execution of a job if a specific interruption instruction is received, and if the user partially changes the settings of the job through a PC or the like during interruption of the job, the printing system restarts the job based on the changed settings. The specific interruption instruction is different from the conventional interruption instruction in that it is possible to make a change in the settings of a job that has already started to be executed.
However, with the specific interruption instruction described above, although the settings of a job can be changed after the execution of the job has started, not only the execution of the job is stopped, but also a preparation operation for the job is stopped. For this reason, the aforementioned interruption instruction is problematic in that it is necessary to again execute the preparation operation when the execution of the job is restarted after a change is made to the settings, which takes time to actually restart the execution of the job.